


Perennial

by notecard



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, I'm not sure if that's a thing yet!, Immortals AU, Moira 1st person PoV, Pre-Fall of Overwatch, Workplace Romance, mutual affection, plot with some fluff, some teasing, sweet science girlfriends, tags are hard haha
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-08
Updated: 2018-02-08
Packaged: 2019-03-15 09:55:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13610913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notecard/pseuds/notecard
Summary: Moira and Angela have been keeping a secret for years, but an old friend from their past could threaten their new life at Overwatch.





	Perennial

Angela walks into my office and sits in the chair across from me. Judging from her sour expression, I close the lid of my laptop and lean back in my chair.

“I’m guessing you found the new rabbit, and I swear he’s only a pet.”

“What? No,” she says curtly. “That’s not why I’m here.”

“Oh, good. You seem especially cheery for a Thursday morning.”

“I’d feel better if I hadn’t found this in the mail,” she replies. 

Angela reaches into the pocket of her lab coat and pulls out a small, dark blue envelope. She places it gently on the desk between us. “An old friend has found us.”

“How old?”

“From two moves ago,” she says, “when we were in New York.”

I take a deep breath, calculating just how many years have elapsed since then. “Well, that is quite old. In fact, I’m surprised anyone we worked with from then is still alive.”

“I was surprised, too, but this letter just arrived today. It was addressed to Overwatch Headquarters.”

“Interesting that this old acquaintance of ours should send it here. Do you know how they found us?”

Angela crosses her legs and bites her lip. After spending so long with someone, it becomes quite easy to read them. She nods.

“She said in her letter that she saw a photo of us in some recent Overwatch news. She wrote, ‘It was like seeing a ghost. I thought you two were dead.’ Oh God, Moira,” Angela says, her voice breaking with tension. “It’s been so long since someone found us like this. What are we going to do?”

“We will treat it like any other ‘ghost sighting’ we’ve had in the past. Ignore them.” I glance at the small blue envelope, noting the return address written in careful cursive. “Do you mind if I take a look?”

“Of course you can. You knew her, too,” Angela says, softer now. 

I pick up the small envelope and take out the decorative letter paper inside. There are two pages written in that fine, antiquated hand. I skim through it quickly.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve even thought of our old friends from back then,” I say. “That was a fun lifetime. I can’t say I remember this woman in particular,” I glance down at her signature, “ah, Carol Belivet. No real memory of her. She must have been better friends with you.”

“Most people are,” Angela says with a small grin, though it quickly deflates. “Carol used to live next door to us. She’s probably almost a hundred by now. I checked the return address online. She’s living in a nursing home in Virginia.”

“Ah, one hundred. What a fun milestone. What did we do for our hundredths? Champagne, cake, that whole thing?”

Angela crosses her arms. “Tell me I don’t have to worry about this.”

“You don’t. You don’t even have to reply. It’s not like she’ll even know you’ve received it, and what could she possibly do if she gets suspicious? Tell the local authorities that she thinks her old friend is actually not dead and is looking surprisingly good for her age?” 

“I know there’s no realistic threat, but I still worry.”

“We’ve had close-calls before. This is not one of them. Not to mention that this time, Jack Morrison and some others in the upper echelons of Overwatch are aware of our…situation,” at this Angela rolls her eyes. “We’re safe.”

“Yes, but…just thinking of New York and everything, I can’t help but feel…” she shakes her head. “I feel guilty.”

“For what?”

“You know for what, Moira. For…,” she takes a long, shaking breath, “for living past our time. For living on and on while others don’t.” 

“I believe our many scientific contributions over the years have more than atoned for that.”

Angela shrugs softly. “Why don’t you feel this way?”

“Who says I don’t?”

“We’ve been together for over two hundred years, Moira, I know you.” Angela stares at me with her inescapable, piercing gaze. “Despite everything, you hardly ever seem worried about things like this.”

“Well, I am concerned with more practical matters, like avoiding bureaucratic nightmares if we get caught not aging, or forging records and documents for the next move. I don’t have time to think about all of the people we’ve had to leave behind. It’s not important.”

Angela blinks fast, her blue eyes now glossy with the beginnings of tears. At seeing that, at realizing my fault, a deep and unbearable pain slices me to the core. “Oh, God, Angela. I’m sorry.” I get up and walk around the desk to the side of her chair. Angela looks away. Her delicate fingers brush away an escaped tear, and I feel profoundly, horribly awful. 

“I am sorry, Angela. Truly. I didn't mean they're not important. They are.” 

“It’s ok. It’s not your fault. I’m…I’m just tired, Moira. I’m tired of pretending and moving on. I don’t want us to leave again.”

“We still have plenty of time before we have to consider the next move. We’ll ride out the next few years with Overwatch and see where things take us. We can even buy more time and just attribute our longevity to substantially better medicine.”

“It was just such a mistake. All those years ago…I still remember that day, you know? The last day we were, well, the last day we were normal. Over two hundred years have passed, and I still can recall every detail.”

“I’ll never forget that day, either.”

“We were so foolish. We shouldn’t have gotten ourselves so deep into something we didn’t understand.”

“That is what scientists do.”

“At that time, you preferred to be called an alchemist,” she says with a small smile.

I scoff. “Well, I had a penchant for the dramatics. Forgive me.”

I lean, half sitting on the sturdy armrest of her chair. 

“We were reckless dreamers with unfortunate luck,” I say softly, “and one fateful experiment gave us exactly what we wanted at the time. Though, in practice, eternal youth has had some unforeseen drawbacks.” 

I pause, glancing at the open blue letter on the desk. It sits surrounded by all of the scientific work that we’ve built upon over the years, encircled by the technology we watched develop in front of our eyes. “You must admit, immortality has its advantages.”

“Like what?” she says with a shrug. “And give me a good reason. Something unrelated to scientific breakthroughs or accumulating lifetimes of knowledge. Something that makes it acceptable to leave behind friends over and over, just to hide for a few years and do it all again. Something that proves this isn’t entirely a curse.” 

Angela looks up at me, her expression caught somewhere between frustration and regret. Seeing those eyes still wet with the beginnings of tears makes my chest ache. 

Every few years, we end up here again. It’s easy to forget about our condition during our everyday routines. We work. We get distracted. We partially forget. Then there’s always something that will push it right in our faces again, something that makes us confront what we are. Something that makes us look at our immortality and realize, despite years of endless analysis and research, we can’t recreate it or explain it or escape it.

I get up and kneel in front of her. I find her hands and hold them in mine.

“Do you want to know one benefit to all of this?” I ask. Angela nods. “I have been able to spend eternity with you.”

Angela laughs, but it’s musical and sincere. She shakes her head and pushes her blonde hair behind her ears.

“So sentimental.”

“It’s true. If we had played by the normal rules back then, if we weren’t immortal, we would’ve gotten…what? Maybe fifty more years together if we were lucky? Fifty boring years of researching and loving in the dark? But this,” I kiss the backs of her hands. “I’d suffer far worse curses to get more time with you.” She giggles as I kiss more along her hands, but as if remembering in a snap, she folds her arms across her chest again.

“I won’t be derailed,” she says with a grin. “We need to talk more about this.” 

“Talk? Please, I do that so much.”

“That’s true. You really do.”

I stand up and pull her up with me. Angela laughs, and in a fluid motion, she leads me to the sofa that sits nearby against the office wall. She pushes me down gently. My back hits the soft surface as she straddles my waist.

“We are going to talk about this,” she says as she sits on top of me, her strong thighs squeezing my waist with a firm, enthralling pressure. “We’ve been searching for a cure for years. We can’t keep running forever.”

“Of course. We will find a cure, or perhaps, a way to make our longevity more viable for practical application. If we could find some way to utilize our particular genome to allow for greater molecular editing-”

“Do not make me bring up scientific ethics before sex again.”

“Is that what we’re doing?” I ask with a smirk.

Her smile is illuminating. Angela laughs brightly as she leans down and takes my lips in hers. There’s an incredible and comfortable ease that comes with years of knowing someone. I feel like I know every curve, every motion. Kissing her is as familiar as coming home.

“After work, perhaps,” she says, breaking contact by only an inch. “It is eleven in the morning.”

“Oh please, darling, time is merely a malleable construct.”

“Your idea of pillow talk is always amusing, Mory.”

I let my hands slip down along her back, feeling her strong figure as she presses against me. There’s a rising tension that I always savor. Angela’s lips move to my neck, pressing soft kisses at the skin above my collar. 

“We have all the time in the world, Angela,” I whisper in her ear. She leans up and kisses my cheek.

“We do,” she replies, “so we both can manage to wait until after work.” She laughs as I groan. She sits back up on my lap and reties her hair into a neat bun. 

“Fine,” I say with an unnecessarily dramatic sigh. “I am truly surprised, though. Usually I’m the practical one.”

“And usually I’m on top.” She smiles mischievously as she pulls on my tie. “Perhaps later tonight we can switch that up, too.” 

“Angela, you’re too cruel to leave me like this.”

“You’ll live. Plus, I know you enjoy a little anticipation.”

She softly pats my cheek as she gets up. I sit up on the sofa, straightening my tie and watching her readjust her clean lab coat on her lean figure. I attempt a level breath, but my heart rate is unfortunately erratic and probably will be for some time. She’s simply too good at this. It’s wonderfully maddening. 

I glance up at her. Her eyes are fixed on the letter. Her hands drift down and fall at her sides.

“I promise, Angela. We are absolutely safe.”

“I hope so.”

I stand up, and, in a rush, she gives me a surprisingly tight hug. I return it, enclosing her smaller body in my arms. She sighs and nods curtly, punctuating the moment.

“Right, well, can you keep an eye on that? I don’t think I really want to see that letter anymore right now,” Angela says. “We can talk about it more later.”

“Of course. And later, after that, when we get home tonight,” I trail off, leaning down to kiss her neck. She lets out a small laugh. 

“We could have gotten so much more work done over these two centuries if we didn’t constantly get distracted,” she says. She pulls on my lab coat and kisses me with finality. “And lastly, where is that new rabbit you mentioned?”

“Oh, you don’t forget a thing do you? It’s truly remarkable. Absolutely astounding-”

“Moira.”

“Cross my heart, Bunnelby is simply a companion.”

“Wow, that is actually too cute. Fine, but if this one starts glowing in the dark like the last rabbit…,”

I raise my hands in defense. “You’ll just have to punish me.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Save it for tonight.” She kisses me once again and leaves. As the door slides closed, I compose myself and sit behind my desk. I make a mental note to perhaps move the newest rabbit to a more discrete location.

I glance at the blue envelope in front of me, and an icy feeling begins to take hold in my chest. I quickly regain focus and instead concentrate solely on the present. I’ve found the human mind is ill-equipped to handle centuries of memories. It’s frighteningly easy to get lost in the past, to become adrift in forgotten moments and old regrets. Angela and I have become exceptionally good at compartmentalizing the past, so we don’t get crushed under its incredible weight.

Although, she sometimes indulges in a greater deal of sentimentality. I crack each knuckle as I look at the letter and think of how best to solve this particular issue. It’s always good to keep our tracks covered, but I realize there is probably no danger here. 

I fold the paper neatly back inside the envelope, place it in a side drawer, reopen my laptop, and get back to work. Luckily, this ghost from our past soon will be gone. She’s almost at the natural limit of how long a human can live. 

Perhaps Angela and I will find out if any limit exists at all. However, with each passing year, I truly believe we have eternity together.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! I might write more for this Immortals AU later! 
> 
> Btw, you can find me at notecardio.tumblr.com :･ﾟ☆✧ ʅʕ•ᴥ•ʔ


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